This started out as a short post about worrying. It is dedicated to my FREN 220 students who will be sitting their final exam next week, to other students preparing for and sitting exams (notwithstanding amusing attempts to undermine our exam season), and to students more generally. You are why faculty are here. And we are here for you. We worry. We want to help: in respectful support.
Image credit: Antony Gormley
(TW: includes cannibals, zombies, bilingualism, and other monsters.)
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[Une version, adaptée aux besoins d’un cours sur la bande dessinée (Université de la Colombie-Britannique Vancouver), de plusieurs guides pratiques pour l’analyse textuelle. Une version plus générale en anglais se trouve ici. / This is a shorter French version of “On reading, writing, and commentary,” for a UBC Vancouver course.] (more…)
PROLOGUE
The original title of this piece is “Criticism & commentary,” but it’s really about reading and writing as harmoniously-integrated activities within the larger whole that is a literary continuum and polyphonic collective; uniting all participants in a living textual network.
Premises and provisos: It views commentary as one of the core and ancient literary/communicative forms, along with story-telling and translation; with story-telling as the living beating heart of this human trinity of curiosity, criticism, and creativity.
It uses literature in its broad sense to extend to “any object that can be read, seen, interpreted” and reading in the broad / Barthes sense to include perception by any of the senses, with “making sense of” as its purpose, and an interpretation translated into expression via any of the senses. This piece sees literature as synonymous with communicative expression. Not as one kind of communication, but the other way around: what passes in other (non-literary) fields as “communication” is a more or less appropriately human, or humanly-appropriate, kind of literature. All writing has a right, duty, and responsibility to be beautiful, imaginative and innovative, and critical and creative. All writing can and should be literature.
What follows below is the current version, for students who are reading and writing, from MDVL 301A : European Literature of the 5th to the 14th centuries – “The Liberal Arts”. Its base was the version used in MDVL 302: European Literature of the 14th to the 16th centuries – “Criticism” (UBC, Faculty of Arts, Medieval Studies Programme, AY 2011-12 Winter session term 2) + a couple of upates (ex. on plagiarism and style guides). It’s one of the oldest pieces on this present blog; its most ancient archaeological layer (writing resources) is from a now-deceased previous site, “The Rose of the Romance” (2003).
“The tree of life”
Gua Tewet, Borneo
(c. 10,000 years ago)
[I’m not writing a proper full blog post myself: I couldn’t do this matter due justice as my word-brain is fried after marking, finally crashing after working since 6 a.m. So I will hand you over to other people who can address it better, more elegantly and eloquently: Eileen A. Joy follows below (I added links, and images from Schuiten & Peeters Les Cités obscures), and other text is from Custodians Online and Rabia Gregory:]
UPDATE on #saveashgate petition-campaign: the Burlington, Vermont office did close on Nov. 25, while plans for the UK office are still up in the air. In addition, it has been announced that the list price of most existing Ashgate titles will increase on Jan. 1, 2016 to $149.95 / £95.00 per title. (more…)
While I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Chronic(le) pieces, and while they can be disappointingly click-baity, I thought this “advice” yesterday from David Perry was splendid. It’s short and simple. Clear and true.
An intellectual property issue:
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Academia, Not Edu,” in Planned Obsolescence (26 October 2015)
COMMENT
QUESTIONS (more…)
UPDATED 2015-10-30
Or, It’s That Time Of Year Again (2, or whatever number we’re up to).
My FREN 101 students have their first Big Scary Written Composition assignment coming up. These are for the most part absolute beginners, with some false beginners, and they have now had six and a half weeks of French. So they’re ready for the Big Scary stuff: being beaten with a big stick and having the Fear of God put into them about The Perils Of Plagiarism.
Plagiarism sucks.
We all know it sucks because it’s theft, lazy, mean, horrible, despicable, immoral or amoral, insulting, reprehensible, and generally makes anyone who is themselves a maker of things prone to fits of pique, unhealthy stress, and the physical agony of resisting the atavistic urge to punch perpetrators.
It sucks less obviously because The Fear discourages students from any form of reference, and encourages their Academic Spirit Guides and other Learnership Leaders to give students assignments that suck because they’re either all about citation (with extreme examples in courses on “academic writing,” whatever that is) or they try to avoid it altogether.
All three Styles of Suck force an ugly unnatural divide between student writing and reference to others in a way that is bad for writing, reading, thinking, and intelligent being. (more…)
Two things, which intersect: twitter and blogging.
I’ve recently reconnected my Twitter account, after letting it lapse and moulder for some time. I had only Twittered around passively in between, reading, mostly short items first read about via other sources and keeping up to date with a conference (or a parallel session) through its # coverage and updates. Twitter has changed over the years and continues to do so. I’m curious to see how (why too, like any other historically- and speculatively-minded reader) and what this means for short-form writing and how it interacts with long-form. You’ll see that most of the Twitterers I’m “following” are comedians; this is partly to see how they work in short-form. (more…)
Writing?
Thinking about writing?
Writing about thinking about writing?
Thinking about writing about thinking?
Trying to write?
Have to write?!?
Trying to write without getting into any of the infinite regresses, anxieties and dreads, and Sloughs Of Despond above?
There is hope. (more…)
